1914: A Very Human Catastrophe

Pacifist utopias: humanitarianism, tragedy and complicity in the Second World War

Reviewed by: Hitler's Shadow Empire. Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War by Pierpaolo Barbieri, and: Great Men in the Second World War: The Rise and Fall of the Big Three by Paul Dukes, and: The Third Reich in History and Memory by Richard J. Evans, and: An Iron Wind. Europe Under Hitler by Peter Fritzsche, and: Implacable Foes. War in the Pacific, 1944–1945 by Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio, and: The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture by Benjamin G. Martin, and: World War II at Sea: A Global History by Craig L. Symonds Jeremy Black Hitler's Shadow Empire. Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War. By pierpaolo barbieri. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. 368 pp. $22.50 (paper). Great Men in the Second World War: The Rise and Fall of the Big Three. By paul dukes. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 216 pp. $88.00 (hardcover). The Third Reich in History and Memory. By richard j. evans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 496 pp. $18.95 (paper). An Iron Wind. Europe Under Hitler. By peter fritzsche. New York: Basic Books, 2016. 384 pp. $29.99 (hardcover). Implacable Foes. War in the Pacific, 1944–1945. By waldo heinrichs and marc gallicchio. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 728 pp. $34.95 (hardcover). The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture. By benjamin g. martin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 370 pp. $39.95 (hardcover). World War II at Sea: A Global History. By craig l. symonds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 792 pp. $34.95 (hardcover). The Second World War, Again All of these books are interesting, but this is the Journal of World History, and I shall review them accordingly, and not with the space or approach that would be relevant were I reviewing for a journal of national or European history. It is, for example, very much the case that the excellent work that continues to come out on German history, on Fascist history, and on aspects of alliance, collaboration and occupation in German-occupied Europe generally fails to draw on parallels elsewhere in the world during this period, and notably so as far as Japanese policy and practice are concerned. Archival issues preclude direct comparisons, but there is much material available in English-language secondary literature and the situation is therefore disappointing. So also for the military aspect of the war and of the pre-war crises. There is some insightful comparative work, commonly on the part of multi-author collections. However, such work pales considerably in scale when compared to the mass of material that looks simply at one of the conflicts that composed the world war. That choice reflects the experience that many individuals had, but not the reality of the strategic dilemmas facing the major powers. Indeed, the war took on strategic weight in terms of a series of time-space equations, and there were very different levels of skill in the handling of these equations. The greatest success, with all the consequences in terms of the staging of operations and, therefore, taking advantage of the pressures and opportunities allowed by simultaneity and sequencing, was achieved by the United States. It and Britain had to confront the issues posed by war with a number of combatants across the world. Germany and Japan each had a number of combatants, but not across such a range. By not fighting Japan until August 1945, the Soviet Union was able to restrict its combatants, and that provided it with major opportunities. These differences were important to the situation discussed by Craig Symonds in his World War II at Sea, although he does not bring out the broader, let alone theoretical, implications of his subject. Moreover, Symonds devotes most of his attention to a customary chronology and a conventional cast. The United States dominates his account. In contrast, insufficient attention is devoted to the Soviet Union and to France. That is a major problem with much of the literature on naval history, but a focus on the leading power is not necessarily helpful. An awareness of the oceanic dimension is an aspect of the key element of geopolitics. This emerges in...

Reviewed by: ‘These Strange Criminals’: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War Thomas P. Socknat (bio) Peter Brock, editor. ‘These Strange Criminals’: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War University of Toronto Press 2004. xviii, 505. $75.00, $45.00 During the twentieth century numerous men and women, either for religious or moral reasons, have refused to fight in or support the military. These conscientious objectors to military service were often treated harshly by their own governments, usually with imprisonment. The stories of their wartime experiences, however, have not always been easily accessible and have certainly not been gathered together in one volume. Now that has been corrected as the voices of imprisoned conscientious objectors come alive once again in this important anthology by Peter Brock, the world's leading historian on pacifism. Brock has pulled together the prison memoirs of thirty conscientious objectors from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that describe their jail experiences during the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War. Although the documents are limited in terms of gender, mainly because women were not conscripted into the military itself and therefore few were viewed as conscientious objectors in the eyes of the law, Brock has extended the definition of 'conscientious objection to military service' in order to include two women objectors in Second World War Britain: Kathleen Lonsdale, a prominent scientist jailed for refusing to perform firewatching duties under compulsion, and Kathleen Wigham, jailed for refusing to obey a direction under wartime industrial conscription (she refused to do work that would relieve anyone to do military service). As the book's title suggests, conscientious objectors were not typical criminals. In fact, their only crime was to remain true to their conscience and oppose military service. Moreover, most of them were well educated, politically aware individuals who were highly observant of prison conditions and often became inspired to fight for penal reform. Strange criminals indeed! The objectors range from well-known historical figures, such as the Briton Stephen Hobhouse and the American Alfred Hassler, to little-known individuals, such as Canadian John Evans and New Zealander Archibald Baxter. While their personal backgrounds and the wars they refused to fight vary, their stories are held together by the common thread of moral conviction and carceral experience. The physical hardships suffered by the objectors were obviously greatest during the First World War, when torture was commonly employed. Both Evans and Baxter recalled instances of routine beatings and rough treatment. The 'worst torture,' however, was not physical, but psychological, and all of the accounts recognize the 'debilitating effects of imprisonment upon the mental, spiritual, and social well-being of the prisoner.' Every entry is a tale of survival and all objectors describe how they refused [End Page 528] to allow the penal system to break their spirit. Rather than just a record of the treatment of imprisoned conscientious objectors, therefore, this book provides an important glimpse into life behind bars throughout the twentieth century and, as such, it will be a valuable addition to the study of criminology and penology as well as to that of conscientious objection. One of the most noteworthy of the accounts is that of Brock himself. Peter Brock was one of those 'strange criminals' who spent four months in two well-known London jails, Wandsworth Prison and Wormwood Scrubs Prison. A second-year history student at the University of Oxford in 1940, Brock was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for refusing non-combatant service (a third of his sentence was remitted for good conduct). His account of those days underlines the general unpleasantness of life behind bars mentioned by others – the boredom, the dreary daily routines, the loss of personal privacy, and the menacing prison atmosphere. Brock's entry would be important for no other reason than because, as he says, there are very few British co prison memoirs from the Second World War, era even though over forty-five thousand objectors were sent to jail. But, of course, his account is also important because it underscores the fact...

This special issue on war writing consists of articles based on presentations at the War in Estonian Culture, Literature and History conference held 15–16 December 2022 at the Estonian Literary Museum. The conference focused on the question of the lasting influence and meaning of the two world wars in Estonian culture, literature and history writing. These questions were underscored by the Russian–Ukrainian war which broke out in February 2022 and which actualised memory of the Second World War, the commemoration of its victims, and a weighing of the consequences, influence and meanings of the war for different memory communities. Anniversaries of historical events that have changed world history call for new scholarly perspectives on the past. Thus, in recent years, in connection with the 100th anniversary of the First World War, studies of related topics have become more frequent, including in Estonia. The article collection The First World War in Estonian Culture (2015) is the first step toward an investigation of the representations of the First World War in Estonian culture. In these studies, diaries and letters have particular value. Surviving private letters permit a better understanding of this great war and its meaning for Estonians mobilised for it. From the perspective of Estonian history, the most significant result of the First World War was the disintegration of the Russian Empire, which made possible the birth of Estonia – colonised for centuries –, as an independent state. Estonia was one of the nation-states that emerged from the disintegration of empires. In 2018, based on the Estonian experience and in an international framework, Anu Raudsepp and Tõnu Tannberg presented our perspective on the influence of the First World War on the creation of nation-states and resultant challenges to the writing of history textbooks. Though the independent Estonian republic was proclaimed on 24 February 1918, the declaration was followed by German occupation in 1918 and the defence of Estonia’s freedom against Soviet Russia in the War of Independence of 1918–1920. The 100th anniversary of the War of Independence also inspired new scholarly research. In 2019 Tõnu Tannberg edited a collection of articles entitled The Many Faces of the War of Independence. The 100th anniversary of the Tartu peace treaty was marked in 2020 by the publication of collective research by historians in a two-volume magisterial work on the history of the War of Independence. The Second World War has been deemed the largest catastrophe in history caused by human hands, during which 60 or 70 million people perished and the destruction changed cityscapes and landscapes beyond recognition. The war reached Estonia in summer 1941 when Soviet occupation was replaced by German occupation. The war years have been represented in the works both of exile writers and writers who remained in Estonia after the war. In Estonian war literature, war poetry has a clear profile, authored by writers who fought in the Second World War on the German side and fled Estonia during the war: Arved Viirlaid, Harri Asi, Kalju Ahven, Einar Sanden, Jyri Kork, Tiit Lehtmets and Eduard Krants. Themes related to war are reflected in the prose of Arved Viirlaid, Ilmar Talve, Ilmar Jaks, Harri Asi, Heino Susi and Agu Kask. Arved Viirlaid’s central work Graves without Crosses I–II (1991, 2009, 2015) is the most popular and most frequently translated work representing the Second World War in Estonian literature. The Tartu cycle by Bernard Kangro and autobiographical short stories by Gunnar Neeme are also remarkable. In Soviet Estonian literature the representation of the Second World War was ideologically constrained; but nevertheless two noteworthy autobiographical war novels were published in the 1970s: Ülo Tuulik’s documentary novel In the Path of War in 1974 (unabridged version 2010) and Juhan Peegel’s I Fell in the First Summer of War in 1979. In addition to belles lettres our historical memory is shaped by autobiographical texts such as memoirs, life stories, autobiographies, letters and diaries, which enable the reader to gain insight into the changes that war brought to everyday life and how people learned to adjust to them. If the memoirs of former combatants have evinced the avoidance of personal points of view and preferences for the matter-of-fact style of reportage, the memoirs and other autobiographical texts of civilians are dominated by the judgments, moods and feelings of the writer as a person. Historical writing on the Second World War is diverse. If from the perspective of western European countries, the main embodiment of evil was Hitler, the situation was much more complicated for eastern European countries. Lack of knowledge of acts of violence committed during the Second World War and later repressions in the countries of eastern Europe and the disregard for international war law by Germany and the Soviet Union have had a significant impact on how the Second World War has been handled in research by historians in Europe and the United States. In most research on the Second World War matters related to the Baltic States are regarded as unimportant compared to the larger processes that took place. Nevertheless, the Baltic states were strategically important both for Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union, making the Baltic question a bone of contention among the allied countries. Over time events that happened in eastern European countries during the Second World War have come increasingly to the fore in scholarly accounts with radically different viewpoints: Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010) by Timothy Snyder, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (2011) by Norman Davies, Soldiers of Memory: Second World War and its Aftermath in Estonian Post-Soviet Life Stories (2011, ed. by Ene Kõresaar). The special issue on war writing contains eight articles on the topic of war, one article on a free topic, a series of translations from the publishing house Loodus, and the archival discovery section in which a letter from the First World War is discussed.

Reviewed by: American Empire: A Global History by A. G. Hopkins, and: The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton Roger L. Albin American Empire: A Global History. By a. g. hopkins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 960 pp. $39.95 (hardcover). The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History. By david edgerton. London: Allen Lane, 2018. 720 pp. $28.75 (hardcover). These two interesting and moderately revisionist books are efforts to undermine the exceptionalism often characteristic of national [End Page 636] histories of the two most powerful states of the twentieth century. Both Hopkins and Edgerton attempt to place the United States and Britain, respectively, within broader and somewhat complementary interpretative frameworks. Hopkins' target is the concept that the United States is exceptional in its rise to global power with Edgerton arguing against the belief that Britain was exceptional in its decline. In different and overlapping ways, both Hopkins and Edgerton deal with the relationships between national states and empires, the spread of industrialization, and the impacts of the ebb and flow of globalization. Hopkins is a co-author of the standard account of British imperial history.1 His American Empire is an impressive effort to re-interpret the broad sweep of American history in the context of a model of imperial-national states based on European-North Atlantic experience over the past three centuries. American Empire is essentially three interleaved and well integrated books. The first component is a general model of the evolution of European empires and nations. The second component is his re-interpretation of American history in light of the model. The third component is a thorough overview of the formal American "insular empire"—Hawai'i, other Pacific islands, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the Cuban protectorate—acquired at the end of the nineteenth century. Hopkins' analysis of the relatively small insular empire is a methodologically thoughtful and important component because careful comparison of the history of the insular empire with the histories of some European empires permits a test of the generality of his model. Based on a prodigious amount of reading and synthesis of the secondary literature, American Empire is a sustained critique of American exceptionalism in two important senses. The first is the popular sense of the United States as possessing a special mission or exalted role in history. The second is a historiographic sense in which American history is a major departure from the history of other North Atlantic states.2 Empires occupy a central place in Hopkins' model as vehicles of "forced globalization." Hopkins presents a three-stage model with "dialectical" features in which initial imperial success leads to countervailing phenomena that undermine the imperial structures. In the initial phase of "proto-globalization," several early modern fiscal-military [End Page 637] European states pursue empires. By the mid-eighteenth century, imperial rivalries heighten the costs of sustaining empires, leading to efforts to extract more colonial revenues. The conjunction of inter-imperial conflicts, increased fiscal demands, and the limitations of long-distance governance lead to colonial revolts and formation of post-colonial states in the Western Hemisphere. The latter follow a relatively stereotyped pattern with initial economic dependence and cultural dominance by the former imperial overlord. The second phase of "modern globalization" in the nineteenth century is driven by the spread of industrialization and emerging national states. These processes permit the great expansion of European empires but also require increasing transformation of oligarchic fiscal-military states into liberal, constitutional states. The spread of industrialization into former colonies results in attainment of "effective independence" as these national states become less dependent on the former metropoles. The domestic strains attending industrialization contribute to the late nineteenth century increase in imperial rivalries, setting the stage for the catastrophe of World War I. After World War I, the continued spread of industrialization and concepts of nationalism lead ultimately to "post-colonial globalization" and the dissolution of imperial states. The American Revolution and early American republic is the archetype of Hopkins' first phase. Following the remarkably successful outcome of the Seven Years War, British efforts to increase control over and enhance revenue from the American...

Physical Education, Exercise, Fitness and Sports: Early PM&R Leaders Build a Strong Foundation

Reviews of Books

Collecting the History of the Church in Australia

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

“‘For Your Freedom and Ours’: Polonia and the Struggle for Polish Independence,” special issue, <i>Rocznik Przemyski</i> 55, no. 3 (23)

This book should command the attention of all Cold War historians. It is a book of prodigious research and immense erudition. Lorenz Lüthi has visited archives in the United States, England, Russia, China, Australia, India, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Austria, among other places. His aim is noteworthy: to “de-center” the Cold War. He argues that, for the most part, developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe had roots not in the global Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union but in “structural” changes in each of these regions that presaged the Cold War's end. He rejects the triumphalist narrative of some U.S. writers, minimizes the role of President Ronald Reagan, and claims that Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, did not want to end the Cold War and instead yearned to win that conflict. Overall, Lüthi stresses the agency of local actors and regional dynamics and claims that the capacity of Moscow and Washington to shape events was circumscribed by “decolonization, Asian-African Internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab-Israeli hostility, and European economic developments” (p. 1).Despite the ambition and learning that inform every page of this tome, the book is beset with interpretive ambiguities and conceptual problems. Lüthi argues that the Cold War was not predetermined but was the collective result of “ideological clashes, unilateral decisions, political disagreements, and misperceptions” (p. 13). Its origins rest in the desires of the USSR to “overthrow the imperialist-capitalist world system and the establishment of a stateless and classless society across the globe” (p. 3). In contrast to Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History (New York; Basic Books, 2017), Lüthi pays scant attention to the economic contradictions within global capitalism in the late nineteenth century, the cyclical fluctuations of business cycles in the early twentieth century, the rise of the Left, the yearnings for structural change within capitalism, and the disillusionment spawned by two world wars and the Great Depression. Rather, Lüthi's focus is on imperial aspirations and ideological conflict. He elides geostrategic motivations, the underlying dynamics of global capitalism, and the legacy of World War II. He does not explain that controlling German power in Europe and harnessing Japanese power in Asia were key components of the global Cold War as well as the regional Cold Wars in Europe and Asia. He does not show how the perceived structural dynamics of global capitalism impelled policymakers in North American, Europe, and Japan to focus on integrating the core industrial areas of global capitalism with markets and raw materials in the “periphery”; that is, in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. He does not illustrate how socioeconomic unrest and political turmoil stemming from the Great Depression and World War II created perceptions of threat and opportunity in Moscow and Washington that set the conditions for the Cold War.The great attribute of this volume is Lüthi's detailed description of developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Cold War historians will be surprised by his decision to place developments in the Middle East at the forefront of the volume (chapter two), even while he argues that the Cold War did not come to the Middle East until the Suez crisis (chapters 8–10). The Middle East commands initial attention because Lüthi focuses on the legacy of British imperialism and the desires of officials in London to remake their empire in the aftermath of World War II with the help of the Arab League. In this context, Lüthi luminously describes inter-Arab dynamics, Arab-Israeli hostilities, and the rise of pan-Islamism. He stresses Anwar el-Sadat's desire to expel Soviet influence from Egypt, the complex dynamics spawned by the Palestinian quest for statehood, and the repercussions of the Iranian revolution. By the early 1980s, he writes, “the Cold War ceased to be the critical structure that shaped the regional system in the Middle East” (p. 518). But it is not clear what he means by the “regional system,” or whether the Cold War had ever shaped it. It is also not clear what constituted the regional Cold War in the Middle East when so many of the wars were hot, not cold. The role of oil in shaping the local, regional, and international dynamics of the different versions of Cold War in the region goes totally unexamined.Lüthi's discussion of Asia is central to the overall thesis of his book. “Three countries,” he writes, “played major roles in Asia's Cold War. China, Vietnam, and India all were dynamic agents in the shaping of their own fates and not just passive battlegrounds in the global competition between the United States and the Soviet Union” (p. 115). Lüthi shows how the Sino-Soviet split, the Chinese rapprochement with the United States, the unification of revolutionary Vietnam, and “the collapse of communism as a unifying program for national liberation” (p. 537) reshaped the Asian Cold War during the 1970s. But here again it is not clear precisely what the Asian Cold War was, and why Japan is totally omitted from its discussion. Perhaps Lüthi would argue that Japan lacked agency, but even if that was the case the country was crucial to the trajectory of the Vietnam War and the U.S. role in it. Numerous historians—Howard Schonberger, Michael Schaller, Andrew Rotter, William Borden, and Robert Blum, among others—have shown in great detail how the goal of reconstructing and stabilizing Japan impelled U.S. officials to thwart Communist gains in Southeast Asia, create an independent South Vietnam, establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and support the rightwing military coup, crackdown, and massacres in Indonesia. While ignoring these dimensions of the Asian Cold War, Lüthi presents fascinating chapters on China, Vietnam, and India, on Asian-African internationalism, and on nonalignment. He shows that the Asian Cold War had many manifestations and permutations. At different times, in different ways, these trajectories affected the U.S.-Soviet global conflict and were influenced by that conflict. But Lüthi also acknowledges that “the end of the global Cold War primarily required a strategic rethinking in Moscow which would only come in March 1985 with Mikhail S. Gorbachev's ascent to power” (p. 537).Strategic rethinking was necessitated by developments in Europe. Lüthi incisively describes the successful integrationist initiatives in Western Europe and the concomitant failures in the Soviet-imposed Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. He emphasizes the ability of Western economies to recalibrate, innovate, and adjust to changing economic and monetary conditions, and he highlights the failures of centrally managed systems to do so. He minimizes the role of the United States in the reconstruction of Western Europe, mentioning that it “provided a stable and supportive framework” (p. 380). Ultimately, the failure of Communist economies to compete and modernize contributed to the flagging popular support for Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. But Lüthi does not make much of an effort to analyze the basic shortcomings in Communist systems, nor does he examine why and how liberal capitalist and social-democratic market economies were able to adapt successfully. For example, he describes the impact of declining oil prices in the 1980s and the constraints that imposed on Moscow's ability to subsidize the economies of its East European satellites, but he rarely makes an attempt to analyze the dysfunctionality of Soviet agricultural policies or the flawed operations of central planning. He stresses the resilience of West European economies but barely mentions the creation of social welfare states and the role of governments in providing minimal social provision and expanding educational opportunity, access to medical care, and support for basic research.This volume is a monumental attempt to de-center the Cold War and restore agency to middle-level powers and local actors. What it does is de-center international politics. It illuminates that much was going on in the latter half of the twentieth century that was not the product of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War but at times intersected with it and contributed to its denouement. Small powers had their own agendas, and regional dynamics had their own logic. In complicated ways, developments in one region influenced those in another. Thanks to the prodigious research of an author with staggering linguistic skills and breathtaking knowledge of multiple literatures, one comes away much better informed about the complexities of international politics but not equally enlightened about the Cold War itself.

In the Slovak Republic (SR), after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in Czechoslovakia and the collapse of ČSFR in 1993, the problem of creating a national narrative of historical memory, in particular about the Second World War, as one of the important elements of the transformation of Slovak society and systemic post-communist transformations in the young state, became more urgent. The article deals with the official version of preserving and popularizing the historical memory of the Second World War in the Slovak Republic, the main state institution for the implementation of which is the Institute of National Remembrance established in 2002, as well as various interpretations by Slovak historians and politicians of such key events of the Second World War as the history of the Slovak state in 1939-1944, the Hungarian-Slovak “Little War” in March 1939, the participation of Slovak military units in the war on the Eastern Front, the Slovak National Uprising of 1944, the Holocaust. Various sources are used: scientific literature and fiction, cinema and historical journalism, military memoirs and memorials of historical memory, materials of “oral history”, etc. The authors emphasize that the bifurcation of Slovak historiography, historical memory and society itself in assessments and interpretations of the events of World War II in national history continues to this day, primarily as a confrontation between official/supranational and national versions of historical memory. The supranational approach, which applies an integral method, synthesizes views, offers multidimensional visions, and evaluates historical facts, phenomena and processes based on the criteria of liberalism and democracy, is preferred at the present stage.

Considering the “Hidden” Challenges of Teaching and Learning World History Robert B. Bain (bio) The popularity of a high school course often masks the challenges students and teachers face in learning its content. Such, I think, is the case with world history. While it is the fastest growing subject of the secondary social studies curriculum (by 2005 over 75% of secondary students graduated having taken a course in world history, an increase of more than 125% in the last thirty years1) world history poses distinctive and often unacknowledged challenges to both teachers and students. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Teachers Concept Map Using Multiple Scales and Multiple Connections Source: Lauren McArthur Harris, “Building Coherence in World History: A Study of Instructional Tools and Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge.” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2008), 304. One challenge is the amount of content. How can teachers and students learn all that “stuff ”? However, a much greater issue in my view is how world history teachers and students learn to manage what Thomas Holt has called “the levels problem,” the complicated relationship between “behavioral explanations sited at the individual level of human experience and those at the level of society and social forces.” The historian’s task, according to Holt, is “to simultaneously grasp the manifestations of the very large and abstract structures and the transformations of the world in the small details of life.”2 Michael Adas agrees, arguing that world history must “infuse the contextual analysis of world systems and structures and aggregate socioeconomic transformations with serious attention to ideas, human agency, and contingency.”3 Or, as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie imaginatively put it, world history requires teachers and students to be both parachutists and truffle hunters.4 Without question, the intellectual capacity to move strategically among temporal and spatial scales is useful, if not outright necessary for both world history teachers and students. A parachute and a nose for history’s truffles are required to make sense of all the events and changes that teachers and students encounter in studying the world’s history. Yet years of teaching experience and a small but instructive body of research on “historical thinking” have convinced me that levels thinking does not come naturally.5 Consider a thought experiment that I along with colleagues have used in workshops with hundreds of history teachers over the past ten years. We ask teachers to construct three- to five-minute histories of the United States, of Western civilization, and of the world. With only a few exceptions, the results are strikingly similar. Teachers tackle the first two challenges quickly, producing common stories with remarkably similar key events: Native American societies, European settlement and colonization, War for Independence, Constitutional Convention, Civil War and Reconstruction, westward expansion and industrialism, World Wars, Depression and New Deal, Cold War, and civil rights movement. Likewise, teachers develop a familiar tale of the growth of Western civilization, marked by common turning points and events: River Valley civilizations, classical Greece and Rome, Dark and Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, nation-states, exploration, democratic revolutions, industrialism, imperialism, World and Cold Wars. But when teachers try to write a brief history of the world, they seem to hit a wall. Few jump into the task right away, and most struggle with where to begin, what to include, and how to order what they include. Some attempt to tell multiple, parallel histories of India, China, and Europe. Still others use European periodization schemes (Middle Ages, Renaissance) situating different civilizations, such as China or India, against a European backdrop. Most teachers report feeling bogged down with details, unsure about what to include, what to leave out, and how things are connected to one another. What, if any, big pictures are available to teachers as they take up the task of constructing world history courses? Even a rough chronology of major events provides teachers a structure within which they might place historical details. The absence of such a frame—as is seemingly the case in world history— likely forces teachers to focus on disconnected facts or serial regional or civilizational stories. Now I am not calling for a grand world historical narrative of...

Conscientious Objectors (COs) oppose war or oppressive social conditions. They suffer for their ethical resistance to that which dehumanizes themselves and others. Their spiritual path is listening to conscience, and the spirit of a deeper, bigger humanity. This listening enables them to take a harder, often lonelier, road. Stories of COs are chosen in this chapter from World War I (WWI). WWI itself was the first mechanized, industrialized, chemicalized war, and the first global war in history. It is also the ‘founding catastrophe of the twentieth century’. It led to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the rise of Hitler and WWII 1939–45, the Cold War 1946–1989, and was the cause of many of the difficulties in the Middle East today, including the attacks on the World Trade Centre, Washington DC and Pennsylvania in September 2001. In a bigger picture of WWI opposition, including workers, women, and soldier poets, COs were at the forefront. Whether socialist or religious, COs have been called the shock troops of resistance in WWI, a war that ironically was promised to be ‘the war to end all wars’. Their stands against nationalism, and for commitment to a bigger humanity, is significant for us today. To echo Martin Luther King, their witness can also provoke us to be ‘creatively maladjusted’ to current nationalisms and social issues. We can be challenged by their example not only to be against war, but also against racism, sexism, poverty, climate change, and political corruption. Indeed, it includes a decision to stand against any violation of the worth of any person, and to champion the sacredness of creation in our troubled times.

Пам’ять про Першу світову війну у монументальному мистецтві Польщі